Visual communication through typoart: a pragmatic approach

Vicente Lpez Folgado and Manuel Balsera Fernndez

(Department of Translation, University of Crdoba, Spain)

Abstract:
The use of typography to create an artwork is a quite extended phenomenon
today, especially in the electronic media. We have called typoart the work produced by
design or plastic artists who make use of typographic resources arranged in differently
in varied shapes and colors. We attempt to focus on some samples of typoart to which
we attribute messages the typoartist wishes to put across to her audience, and probably
make them think over a range of meaningful assumptions. As argued here (Sperber and
Claidire, 2007), cultural information can be relevant to identifying the causal
relationships of items which can trigger effects for future behavior
As both linguistic and iconic codes are far from being fixed, the best way of
accessing to an interpretation is to invoke the pragmatic approach known as relevant
theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995). We then discuss some important issues as
exemplified in a series of cartoons dealing with a number of commonplace issues which
we can easily find in the worldwide web. We discuss the possible intentions and clues
to relevant communication, where the amount of mental effort is offset by the cognitive
effects on the audience. Calligraphic skills conform to a mental representation with
common traits but also varying practices that can be studied as bearers of cultural
information.
Key words: typoart, relevant theory, visual thinking, pragmatic inference, aesthetic
cartoons.
1. Introduction
When we learn our native language, we tend to build well-constructed sentences in
our mind, as Chomsky (1968/2006: 45) argued:
Furthermore, it is wrong to think of human use of language as characteristically
informative, in fact or in intention. Human language can be used to inform or
mislead, to clarify ones own thoughts or to display ones cleverness, or simply
for play. If I speak with no concern for modifying your behaviour or thoughts, I
am not using language any less than if I say exactly the same things with such
intention. If we hope to understand human language and the psychological
capacities on which it rests, we must first ask what it is, not how or for what
purposes it is used. When we ask what human language is, we find no striking
similarity to animal communication systems.
This happens in our first stages in life: so we are able to master thousands of
sentence combinations in our language. As we all know, we use that knowledge of a
language in order to communicate a message to other human beings. And a given
audience understands us because they also possess that common knowledge of the same
language which acts like a code for putting across informative signs. Language is no
doubt the most perfect code for communication and through verbal interaction takes
place the most accurate form of human exchange of messages. In the next pages we will
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also refer to other communicative input that come through the sense of sight and is also
crucial to our understanding of the world around. One such communicative event is
calligraphic artistic practices. Calligraphy is a cultural practice both in Oriental in
Western countries which bear behavioral practices displaying a set of relatively
expected mental representations (Sperber and Claidire, 2007).
1.1 The pragmatic theory
H. P. Grice (1975/ 1989) assumes that the nature and purposes of pragmatic theory
is mostly inferential: the audiences goal is to recognize the intended interpretation of an
utterance, and that the speakers intentions cannot be simply decoded but inferred.
However, Grices inferential approach sees communication as en essentially cooperative, social activity, whereas the approach we are putting forward here is
psychologically based. Grice (1975: 45) believes that talk exchanges have mutually
accepted purpose or direction And then he argues: Our talk exchanges are
characteristically, to some extent at least, co-operative efforts; and each participant
recognizes in them, to some extent, a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least a
mutually accepted directionwhich may be fixed from the start or it may evolve during
the exchange. He seems then rather vague with such notion. And yet, his social rules or
principles of co-operation are purposeful: make your contribution such as is
required etc. As for the relevance principle, Grice thinks of it as supplying
appropriate information for current purposes, just as if one was making a cake. If I am
mixing ingredients for a cake, I do not expect to be handed a good book, or even an
oven cloth (Grice 1975: 47).
However, Grices principle of relevance cannot be defined in terms of purpose, but
of intentions: a representation of a future state of affairs that plays a causal role in
determining someones present behavior. While giving and receiving information it is
hard to foresee a mutually accepted purpose of a given exchange which is bound to
vary from one utterance to the next. It is a hard task to fix that purpose in advance.
Relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/95) is a cognitive theory, not a social one:
it assumes human mind is set up in such a way that it pays automatically attention to
information that thinks it relevant. So to communicate is to request your audiences
attention by raising expectations of relevance: it modifies the audiences existing
cognitive assumptions about the world. It can do this in three ways: by strengthening
existing ones, by contradicting and eliminating other, or by combining with existing
ones to yield what we call contextual implications.

Fig 1.
Against a well-known background of the Tour Eiffel we are given new messages to
read the letters of which give shape the famous tour. The intended messages that we
find relevant are those which tend to reinforce our idea of Paris: the cultural capital of
love encounters and lovers trip destination: lamour, je taime, toujour The most
interesting places for visitors are written in different kinds of typographical fonts which
make up the structure of the tower: Seine, toile, Sacr Coeur, Pantheon, Muse
Picasso, Bastille etcThus the cartoon provides us with new, visual information: the
shape of the tower is made up with new material: typographical names of famous
places in Paris. It is an imaginative typoart is born.
1.2. The typoart work
In the example of typoart 1 there is a sentence arranged in different typographic
letters, which we attribute to the informative message of a typoartist: she wants to put
across a message to us, and probably make us think on her assumption:
Make good typography in the form of a cloud of smoke produced by a fire. Like
smoke in a fire it is a flexible, burning issue that changes its shape. Typoart products
have an aesthetic dimension born out of the imagination of the typoartist. The metaphor
of a fire with black and white smoke is relevant for the shapeless, imaginative
inspiration of typoartists.

We call typoart the art work that uses typography as the main means of expression.

Fig. 2
There can be no doubt that the linguistic message in figure 3 can be understood by
everyone who knows English: Let the love tear us apart. However, lets now argue
that there is an enormous gap between knowing what a certain sentence in our language
means and understanding all that a speaker intends to communicate by uttering that
sentence on a certain occasion (context). So the code is not all there is in
communication, quite on the contrary, it is our knowledge of the context which makes
us derive the intended messages, no matter how elliptic or clipped the utterance may be
on some occasions.

Fig. 3
We have to interpret what the speaker intended to say to us, in spite of our sharing
a common language. We do that through inference making: we try to guess the
typoartist intentions while doing it. We should note that s/he does not say: Let love tear
us apart but let the love which is a particular love relationship, not just love in
general. We may rely for instance on what appear to be love letters and think that letters
is the only linking tie between the lovers who live far from each other. The predominant
hot red, pinkish color both of the background and the actual graphs may support our
inferential guess that two lovers are painfully torn apart by circumstances.
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Fig. 4
Typoartartifacts are of that character too. In figure 4 we can notice that there is a
certain willingness on the part of the artist to call our attention to the variety colour,
size, types, ornament, and arrangement of graphs- so as to provide some sought-after
effects. We will attempt in the remaining pages to show how the multidimensional
process of searching for a kind of aesthetics has achieved some new, relevant goals in
communicating certain messages. As some authors like R. Harris (1983; 1998) suggest,
writing systems should still retain some primitive vestiges of pictorial figures. He is also
convinced that the romantic view of the origin of writing is a very ethnocentric view,
and specifically Eurocentric view (Harris, 1989: 99).In fact, it is a view summed up
with admirable concision in the eighteenth century by Charles Davy, who argued
following the topical opinion of the day: Writing, in the earliest ages of the world, was
a delineation of the outlines of those things men wanted to remember, rudely graven
either upon shells or stones, or marked upon the leaves or bark of trees (Davy, 1772).
The history of writing was seen accordingly in terms of a universal progression
from pictograms to logograms to phonograms, culminating eventually in the alphabet.
Now we have no doubts about the potential effects of the graphs, both aesthetic and
informative. The typographical playful handling what we call typoart of the letters
of lexical items is today used for achieving certain contextual effects.

Fig. 5
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An acquaintance with Latin, Greek or Hebrew alphabetic writing opens up for the
sophisticated reader endless views of unique audio-visual aesthetic pleasure (S. Levin,
1987). A major feature of scripts is that they are linear, representing therefore the
succession of written graphs occurring in a one-dimensional spatial order,
corresponding to the succession of speech in a temporal flow. In figure 5 it seems to be
a tension to be solved between the vertical and the horizontal. Typical scripts then show
a linearity that should be underline as visual sign in a graphic semiotic system related to
the oral signs of speech they represent, as the psycholinguist A. R. Luria (1978)
suggested.As R. Harris (1978: 268) argues:
In the Upper Paleolithic period we are already dealing with a stage in the evolution
of graphic representation at which the sign is conceptualized as having an existence
which is separate from the surface on which it is inscribed. This divorce between
sign and object is an advance of the greatest significance.
2. Verbal and non-verbal input
The distinction among us between the traditional treatment of utterance as verbal,
and writing as non-verbal pieces of writing, comes to the fore: utterances are
automatically sponsored by those who utter them, while sentences, by contrast, have no
sponsors: they are autoglottic abstractions. However, R. Harriss (1983) standpoint
differs substantially from our pragmatic, non-structuralist (or dualistic) view of
utterance. In the examples of our concern words are used with a double purpose: First,
to provide a shape for drawing the outline of the referent, and second, to provide a
plethora of meanings associated with the object in question. The translation from script
to vocal signs is not so automatic as it seems; we do at school in our Western culture,
since we still retain in our memory the subtle meanings of letters in their actual shape as
graphs. The complexity of such a transfer is not so complete after all, maybe because
our overriding visual memory predominates over the abstract aural one, and finally
cannot do away with the traces left by script.

Fig. 6
Figure 6 contains statements declaring the unquestionable value of typography in
cartoons: typography takes care of the letters; otherwise we would run the risk of
losing it while she is bound to sell her services to designers with no scruples. The
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terrible consequence, expressed in imaginative romantic terms, of the supposed

abandonment is that nobody would be able to speak neither express her feelings and
humanity would then be condemned to wander aimlessly through waste lands (our
translation). In a way, the cartoon aims at reflecting a child who grows with all types of
typoscripts about him, an indispensable cultural heritage in our Western society.
In figure 7 we do understand the meaning of drop both as a verb and as a
deverbal noun: a movement downwards. This is visualized here as the falling letters of
the word in English, independent from the thought itself of a cluster of molecules of a
liquid that hand together in one single entity.Now, just as a liquid, like black oil, for
instance, gathers together as it is spread out on the ground, letters are also spread in a
shamble on the ground of the picture. As for the color yellow we have more doubts
about the artists determination to using it. We cant venture a number of hypotheses
which are obviously non demonstrable, as it is actually a matter of speculation the
effects produced by color, no fixed code existing in the use of colors.

Fig. 7
The distinction among us between the traditional treatment of utterance as verbal,
and writing as non-verbal pieces of writing, comes to the fore: utterances are
automatically sponsored by those who utter them, while sentences, by contrast, have no
sponsors: they are autoglottic abstractions.
2.1. The context of utterance
So, there seems to be other non-linguistic factors as well that should be taking into
account. Pragmatics starts where linguistics leaves off. As H. P. Grices model of
pragmatics claimed, there is a difference between what is said and what is implied.
Though there are countless factors that can illustrate the difference between
sentence meaning and utterance interpretation they fall into three separate categories:
a) What was said?
b) What was implied?
c) What was the speakers attitude to the two previous questions?
Now notice that each of these questions with or without reference to the speakers
intention. The speaker, in fact, may have different intentions to our interpretation of

them. As we speak our utterance may have unwanted implications. Think of it when
listening to politicians.
No doubt, the sentence of fig 2 is only to some extent understandable: though the
message is a well-built sentence in English, there is some obscure meaning in it. Does
the sentence imply something which we have to think twice about its meaning?
Certainly it does: Love, the central word that is in bigger case, is the actor of a material
action: tear us apart. Now we wonder who are the people to whom us refers to? How
can LOVE tear some people apart, when we know that LOVE connects people? Its a
kind of irony that makes us stop and spend some time in recovering the meaning
(interpreting) of the message: so LOVE can also separate people?
Artworks are stable things, and are done by authors whose intentions are hidden
and left for the audience to discover in the displayed in the artwork. In the example of
figure 2 we have a piece of utterance that may hide implicit meanings. Moreover, we
can only guess the artists attitude towards the message implied. There are types of
communication which we can call overt, and other types which are, to a certain extent,
covert. In overt communication the speaker has no hidden intentions and takes
responsibility for what he says or implies, whereas in covert communication the speaker
intentionally manipulates the audience and leave it to them the interpretation of the
message.
According to the inferential model, a communicator provides evidence of her
intention to convey a certain meaning, which is inferred by the audience on the basis of
the evidence provided. An utterance is, of course, a linguistically coded piece of
evidence, so that verbal comprehension involves an element of decoding. However, the
linguistic meaning recovered by decoding is just one of the inputs to a nondemonstrative inference process which yields an interpretation of the speakers
meaning.
2.2. Relevance Theory
Relevance theory has something to say about both intended and unintended aspects
of utterance interpretation. The proponents, Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995) focus on
the form of communication which they call ostensive-inferential, according to which,
the communicator produces a stimulus that makes it mutually manifest both to
communicator and audience that the former intends, by means of such stimulus, to make
manifest or more manifest to the audience a set of assumptions (1995: 63). Ostentions
(Tanaka 1994: 19) consists of two layers of information: the initial layer is the
information which the speaker points out to the hearer. The second layer consists of the
speaker indicating that he has intentionally pointed out the first piece of information to
the hearer.

Fig. 8
Trees have represented the mystery and power of nature ever since the earliest
myths and human manifestations of writing. Trees also have cultural meaning in
connection with human ecology and environmental values (sustainable policies,
future life on earth) That is reason why they remain a strong symbol in our Western
civilization.
If an artist draws or paints a tree he may tell us a number of assumptions he has in
his mind, but we have to infer them, as he does not make manifest such assumptions as
a proposition: trees are temperature regulators in a big city, trees are fruit bearers, trees
are relevant to natural life, trees should be cared for, trees should not be cut down
etc...On the other hand, we have a ladder in figure 8 as a primary and cognitive
metaphor: a ladder may be interpreted as means of contact between any two levels, thus
pointing to an object with the function of climbing so as to connect or to achieve a
goal.Now, in the famous semiotic triangle (by Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of
Meaning, 1923) the sign as symbolic vehicle and the (picture of) the referent coincide in
figure 7. The conventional name of an object, the tree, the sign vehicle is typoartistically visible in the trunk of the referent.

Fig. 9
But this just an intrusion of one angle of the triangle into another: the symbolic
sign in English invades one part of the referent object. However, the upper angle, the
sense or concept, is the most relevant angle.
3. Looking back to semiotics
As The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset (Complete Works 1983: 434)
suggested: It is untrue to suppose that Spaniards call bosque the same (idea) that
Germans in turn call Wald; however, the dictionary tells us that Wald means bosque. 2
The reason he adduces is obviously cultural. But one neednt appeal to cultural
differences of a whole nation in interpreting a word or piece of discourse. The
audiences interpretation of an utterance can be and usually is personal. One utterance is
relevant for a single individual as hearer, a limit which is not to be extended beyond in
cognitive pragmatics.
This first semiotic scheme gained some complexity when understanding an
utterance involves a great deal more than knowing the meaning of words uttered and the
grammatical relations between them. Pragmatics developed the study of the relations
2
The same could be said about countless words in any two languages. Ortega y Gassetpointed to the meanings in a
bilingual dictionary because he was interested in translation, where meanings are supposed, rightly or wrongly, to be
shared by the whole community of the speakers of a particular language.

between language and context that are basic for an account of language understanding
(S. Levinson 1987: 21) Pragmatics.Cambridge U. Press.

Fig. 10
As Figure 10 above shows, there is a meta-representation of the symbol itself
which is recurrent in purporting the information of language use in the minds of the
speakers and the object not always real but imagined. The typographical cartoons
conveying such messages seek to rework critical reflection by means of metaphorical
visualization, as a holistic process that interrelate the semiotic-ostensive intentionality
of the addresser with the addressees cognitive-inferential one, where typographical
playful handling of the letters of relevant lexical items is used for achieving certain
contextual effects. This argument is founded in a theory of communication that has a
firm grasp on the pragmatic view of the triangle cited above.
Accordingly, the mentally represented concepts encoded by lexical items are
atomic (Fodorian view) which provide access to various kinds of mentally represented
information (in particular the encyclopaedic information about the entities denoted by
the items). This implies genuinely inferential processes, and let us add that an inferential
account of lexical pragmatics is preferable to non-inferential accounts. In sum, we
believe that the use of lexical items are flexible, highly context dependent processes
which cannot be adequately handled solely in terms of code-like rules.
3.1. The various purposes of typoart
We totally agree with D. Sperbers (1995: 191) words concerning communication:
To communicate is to attempt to get someone to share your thoughts well, at
least some of them. But how can thoughts be shared? Thoughts arent things out
there in the open, to be sliced like cakes or used collectively like buses. They are
strictly private affairs. Thoughts are born, live, and are inside our brains. They
never truly come out of our heads (although we talk as if they did, but this is just a
metaphor).

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Fig.11
Here the actual shaping bricks that make the object of publicity are the words of
the components; tar, sulphuric acid, carbon monoxide etc. Wilson and Carston (2006)
A unitary approach to lexical pragmatics). They argue that most current approaches
to lexical pragmatics also share the view that lexical meanings (even hyperbolic and
metaphoric) contribute to the truth-conditional content of utterances (what is asserted or
explicated) as well as to what is implicated. Metaphor and other rhetorical tropes are
no exception to ordinary language. In fact, ordinary language, as argued by Lakoff and
Johnson (1982), consists mostly of metaphors.
Far from the strictness of the semiotic code we should pay attention to the angle of
concept where different minds would think unalike. The dangerous chemical
components of a cigarette may affect some people more than other, simply because their
beliefs, customs, addictions or health attitudes differ. Here the typoart work has a
warning effect, mixed with an aesthetic effect to be evaluated by the individual. Human
communication is a by-product of our meta-representational capacity, thats our ability
to make inferences about one anothers state of mind. That was essential to human
survival in primitive societies aimed at predicting one anothers behavior. Thus, the
typoartist anticipates what can be aesthetically enjoyed by others while sending
secondary messages that can be viewed as publicity. Thus, figure 11 supports healthy
habits by warning the audience about the damaging chemicals contained by a cigarette
which can be variously inferred by us.
This pragmatic theory based on human cognition enables us to make a distinction
between two types of intentional communication that can be called overt and covert.
The latter is non ostensive, i. e. it does not show quite clearly what the speakers
intentions are, though they can be gathered from a series of signals or cues. Now, in
approaching antypoartwork the communication is often overt, and sometimes covert, as
the stimulus or input is complex: not only the verbal stimulus counts but also the artistic
context in which they come up purport additional assumptions and meanings. As
defined by K. Tanaka (1994: 41): Covert communication is a case of communication
where the intention of the speaker is to alter the cognitive environment of the hearer, i.
e. to make a set of assumptions more manifest to her, without making his intention
mutually manifest.

Fig. 12
The last sentence draws the difference between covert and overt. In the former the
informative intention is clear, but not so the communicative intention. The typoartist
11

relies in the latter case on the audiences noticing certain non-linguistic, aesthetic (color,
shape, arrangement) stimuli to overcome the deficit of overt, ostensive ones. So the
responsibility falls on the audience to recover the typoartists meaning through
implicatures weakly communicated rather than on strongly communicated utterances.
Visual material pictures, etchings, drawings, designs, cartoons often has to be
interpreted as covert communication where the onus is on the audience to recover the
relevant, intended meaning. In figure 11 the message refresh your forgotten
trigger a message of renewal by making alive or fresh again, associated with a garden
half watered by a watering can which turns green the already dried leaves on the hedge
espaol.
Now let us add that an inferential account of lexical pragmatics is preferable to
non-inferential accounts. In sum, we believe that the use of lexical items are flexible,
highly context dependent processes which cannot be adequately handled solely in terms
of code-like rules.

Fig. 13
This cartoon (figure 13) is entitled death by typography by G. Core, where the
medium (the graphs) and the ethical message is inextricably linked, the typography
being a metaphorical icon of the gun itself, the very material whereof the tool is made.
Hence, the title of the cartoon. The words that fall outside are the noise produced by the
gun: Bang!, the now universal onomatopoeic expression for firearms firing noise.
The messy, disheveled typographical material we can discern that shapes out the
gun includes significant letters like ts, ds, rs and as among others in the tangle: arm
and death are written with them. The trigger is an r that is visible in the word arm, and
also has a similar appearance as a graph. The perception of graphical features of letters
and words are exploited to echo their meanings. Thus, the examples of the many
cartoons, magazine covers and pieces of aesthetic artworks we have examined may fall
into at least three different categories:
Firstly, the pictorial puns, some are easy, other not so easy to interpret, where the
audience may find some difficulties in deriving the intended information.
Secondly, the use of words as patterned elements in larger designs. Though
initially obscure, they can be accessed to through longer processing cost.
A third group would is even more based on perception: the iconic image represents
the words the same phenomena they actually embody. The tree branch (Figure 14) could
be seen as a metaphor standing for a place for a living. A natural environment for two
birds as substitutes of two human beings called Mary and John. The color contrast of
the branches made up of the names of a human couple makes the birdies red silhouettes
stand out.
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Fig. 14
Again the typo is the material for an artistically designed cartoon inviting natural
intimacy. In the next typoart cartoon (figure 15) we have the Italian peninsula actually
made up of lexical items in varying sizes and positions in two colors, red and green of
the Italian banner. Now it is a harshly critical cartoon where words or phrases seem to
denounce the actual depressed economic situation.

Fig. 15
The caustic critique full of commonplace ideas is directed both to the ruling class
and to the citizens who are potential voters: ridiculous politicians tax evasion and
Berlusconi appear in the north; there we can read: lets go to London to find a job and
in the center of the country we can read: Lets go to Milano to find a job and cant
speak English, illiteracy, a lot of idiots, garbage, pollution, ignorance etc. in
the backward south. Sicily in turn is occupied by the word Mafia and jobless.
Sardinia has to cope with the irony of the similarity of sounds in beaches and bitches
and are treated as liars. Anyway, the vicious attack of the cartoonist goes on to
ironically criticize the good weather in the north; but when it snows you cant move

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from home. However, the national products are extolled: good food, the best pizza,
very good coffee as if they were the only good things in the whole country.
3.2. Typoart and poetic effects
So our pragmatic position would hold that cartoons, such as the ones shown so far,
seem to bear iconic, visual effects on our assumptions about the world. In a way, these
effects seem to play a similar role as the poetic effects as put forward by Pilkington
(2000). In the typoart cartoon this aesthetic effect is all the more visible. As in the case
of figurative lexical items, the mind of the audience should retrieve contextual
assumptions implicated in the cartoon: the shape, the scripts, the visual forms, the
overall picture.
Poetry also has a place in typoart, as we can see in figure 16. This lyrical poem is
arranged not in lines, but in a variety of intersecting linear fonts of various sizes on a
green background. The effect of the white letters over dark and light green stripes is
supposedly one of freshness. The color effect, however, is a matter of personal feelings
and nothing can be said about preferences in colors. De gustibus non estdisputandum,
goes the classical Latin saying.
There is in figure 16 a number of visual effects alongside with the text of the
poem: symmetries, word shading, optical reflections, playful orthography, to name but a
few. We may note that the word ME is the biggest size, followed by think and love.
The poem is unfinish but the main message is: stop to think of me

Fig. 16
But, needless to say, it is utterances, not pictorial icons, which communicate
propositions of thoughts. Therefore iconic material in a cartoon must be translated or
interpreted into verbal utterances if we are to derive propositional information. In spite
of the effort made by the audience to read figure 17, the audience is eventually
compensated by the effect triggered by the word reflection. Words in the cartoon can
be easily read with the aid of a looking glass. That covert communicative utterance
informs of a proposition: your actions are just the reflections of your words a thought
that aims at being deep and worth processing through a relatively great cost of effort.
This is due to the mirror effect: words should be read the wrong way round, except by
the word reflections in red prominent color in sharp contrast with the black of the
mirrored ones. The effect is somewhat covertly poetic.
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Fig. 17
In sum, while coding and decoding a certain semiotic fixed verbal code, ostension
and inference have a non-conventional, fixed nature, and are two sides of the same coin.
Ostension refers to the production of input, i. e. verbal and non-verbal stimuli in the
audience whereas inference is the hypothetical-deductive computations the audience has
to make in her mind. The audiences attention is drawn to some stimuli in order for her
to infer the set of assumptions the addresser here the typoartist- tries to communicate
(Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995: 63).

Fig. 18
Figure 18 is entitled Hiroshima-Nagasaki, 50 years (1995) created by Shigeo
Fukuda. The New York Times described how Fukuda's posters distilled complex
concepts into compelling images of logo-simplicity. On August 9, 1945, a new type of
bomb (an atomic bomb) exploded in Hiroshima which was used for the second time
following the dropping of a similar bomb on Nagasaki. The NO is intended against the
bomb, whose explosion mushroom is an aggressive fist clenched over the O. The ethical
or lack thereof of a specific artwork involves a major discussion on the goals and
purposes it pursues. The moderate position is similar to the centuries-old discussion of
poetics, which eventually refers to overcome the bias relative to artworks where ethical
values are mostly autonomous. As Giovannelli (2007) put it:
Of course, banning ethical talk about works of art does result in opposing ethical
criticism. Yet, by no means need the case for autonomism depend on such a ban.
15

The same is true of other interpretations of the claim Carroll attributes to radical
autonomism, suchas the ethical thesis that artworks are never immoral, or the
overriding thesis that artistic value trumps all other values, or, again, the
prescription, proper of a poetics, that art making should avoid attaching any moral
function to an artwork, for that cannot but ruin the works artistic value. 3
Conclusion
If non-linguistic icons do not strictly communicate propositions, then they should
contribute actively to their loose formation. As Arnheim (1969/1973: 242) suggested:
Since language is a set of perceptual forms auditive, cinesthesic, visual we
may wonder to what extent it lends itself to the manipulation of structural
properties. The answer must ignore the so called word meanings, i.e. their referents.
They belong to a different domain of perceptual experience. It must limit itself to
the forms of language.
So words meanings in typoart are bound to be a matter of inferential computations,
rather than a matter of semantic decodification. Therefore, they tend to be loosely
deciphered through pragmatic implicatures, as foreseen in a Relevance-theoretical
approach. The assumptions then derived from the loose implicatures purported by the
source cartoon should be taken into account. As E. H. Gombrich (1951/1985) suggested
long time ago, all perception occurs in the context of memory and expectation. What we
see is always interpreted as retrieved from our memorys store and then are set in
contrast with other similar iconic objects. He explained this with the German
psychological term Einstellung (or mind set). Gombrich, (1985: 222) then argued:
Perception is always a transaction between us and the word, and the idea that we
could or should ever perceive an image without the preconception or expectations
we derive from prior knowledge and experience would resemble the demand that
we should make an electric current flow from the positive pole without connecting
the wire with the negative pole.
However, the linguistic element plays an important role as a conceptual translation of
what the images may mean to us. Typoart works are an aesthetic mixture of iconic and
verbal elements the main clues of which must be processed and interpreted through a
mixed inferential work.
In sum, as R. Carston (2002: 131) aptly put it:
.when a code is involved it needs do no more than provide whatever clues,
whatever piece of evidence, the speaker judges necessary to channel the inferential
process in the right direction. The linguistically encoded element of an utterance is
not generally geared towards achieving as high a degree of explicitness as possible,
but rather towards keeping processing effort down (no more than is necessary for
the recovery of the intended cognitive effects), so information that is clearly already
highly activated in the addressees mind is often not given linguistic expression.
The pleasure we may derive from watching alphabet signals taking part in the
shaping of an object is but a metaphor of language. The signals themselves are like
3

This is best discussed inCarroll, N. (1998b). Moderate moralism versus moderate autonomism.The British Journal
of Aesthetics, 38,419424.

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bricks forming a wall: they are meaningless by themselves but are semantically
meaningful in combination, thus forming up words in a language. It is when they are
read by us that those words are actual utterances which help us make the relevant
assumptions about the world (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/95). The typoart items have
contextual implications, or inferences which follow from the combination of the
propositional content of the utterances in the cartoon with the contextual assumptions
triggered by the audiences visual interpretation of the typoart product.
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